This is a creative writing piece I wrote for my English Language class but I would be lying if I said I didn’t take lots of inspiration from my life and a little from others around me. I hope it conveys the important message that I want it to for Mental Health Awareness Week!

This was my journey and it was not an easy one.

It began when my heart started to pound, the voices in my head screaming at me, my anxiety trying to swallow me up and wanting to become invisible to everyone else. I was running, sprinting away from all my problems by submerging myself in worries. The normal classroom noises sounded like the screams from a natural disaster.

This is when I knew I needed help and I was ready to do anything within my power to get it. When every doctor told me there was nothing they could do I was knocked further down from this mountain I had to climb. Every time I was rejected by professionals my jaw dropped and I was incredulous at their ignorance; I was not going to let them stop me.

As my bad habits became bigger than bumps in the road but walls in my journey my struggle with getting out of bed everyday became like learning a language in a day: impossible.

However, this was not the end. I struggled with this illness so that I could advocate for others: I saw doctors, I worked on myself, I started conversations and I attempted to erase stigma. The system was against me the whole time, as was the constant weight of the entire world’s problems on my shoulders.

When it felt as if my family and friends misunderstood and there was a complete lack of communication I had to be my own beacon of hope; I had to have faith, not in a God, but in myself. As my mind and body recovered each time from the effects of abnormal stress, I pushed on with school and the grinding daily schedule of meetings and things that once inspired me. Each time a panic attack occurred or I couldn’t clamber out of bed I thought I had fallen again to the bottom of this colossal peak.

Then I looked behind me. I observed how far I’d risen, how far I’d come on my own, and I was ready to continue my journey of counselling appointments, medication, GP’s and tears. These walls I had built around myself where each brick was an anxiety of my own were not only caging me in but keeping others out. My journey was not mine, I no longer wanted it to be just me so that I could protect the ones I loved, I wanted them to join me because I knew that would cause less pain and suffering all around.

“You wouldn’t climb a mountain on your own, so why do you have to face your mental illness in solitude,” I exclaim proudly as I step down from the podium.

A sea of stunned faces look back at me, each young person realising that they have a mountain of their own to climb, a journey that they need to go on. Their journey may never end and that is okay because mine hasn’t and it never will. However it will get easier as I develop my skills and work on myself and I have realised that part of my journey is helping people with their’s.